All The Anti-Israel Propaganda That's Fit To Show

Looks like another "fake but true" story is unraveling, this time in France:

Suffice it to say here that the iconic image of the child Mohammed al Durah, pictured crouching with his father behind a barrel next to a concrete wall in an apparently vain attempt to shelter from the gun-battle between Israel and the Palestinians that was raging around them before he was allegedly shot dead by the Israelis, served to incite terrorist violence and atrocities around the world after it was transmitted by France 2 at the beginning of the second intifada. Yet it is clear to anyone looking at this in detail that the whole thing was staged, not least from the devastating evidence here which shows the boy raising his arm and peeping through his fingers seconds after the France 2 correspondent Charles Enderlin said he had been shot dead.

After Philippe Karsenty, founder of the French online media watchdog, Media Ratings, accused France 2 of staging the al Durah ‘killing’ and called for the resignation of both Charles Enderlin and France 2’s News Director, Arlette Chabot, France 2 and Enderlin sued Karsenty for defamation, and won. In a disgraceful piece of judicial cronyism after the gratuitous intervention of the then French President Jacques Chirac, the court decided against Karsenty and in favour of France 2 and Enderlin. Karsenty appealed; the judge ordered France 2 to produce the unscreened footage of this incident; today it did so.

And here's a short list of the problems with the footage:

There were many very strange things about this footage which just didn’t add up. When it came to the footage of the ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah, the following stood out:

* This sequence was not a continuous narrative but was repeatedly broken up and spliced onto footage of other scenes from the demonstration

* Although the France 2 cameraman had told a German film-maker, Esther Schapira, that he had filmed six minutes of the al Durah father and son under continuous Israeli fire, the footage of them lasted for less than one minute

* There was a camera tripod next to them

* There was no evidence of the boy actually being hit

* At one point, people in the crowd cried out that the boy was dead, while he was sitting up large as life clinging onto his father with his mouth wide open

* After he was said to be dead, he moved his arm (the sequence I have already reported which has been available on the web for years).

Fortunately, it appears that this story is about to end up in the same file as Scott Beauchamp's Baghdad Diarist and Dan Rather's faked Texas Air National Guard memo.

You'd think that journalists, who are supposed to be aware of what's happening in the world, would realize that they just can't get away with this sort of distortion anymore. My gut feeling is that the journalists who are still trying to do things like this live and work in an isolated leftist "bubble" which has a tenuous connection to reality at best.

What DID Those Israeli Jets Do in Syria?

On 6 Sept, Israeli aircraft did something in Syria. That much is pretty well established. But what exactly happened? Charles Krauthammer has a guess:

Circumstantial evidence points to this being an attack on some nuclear facility provided by North Korea.

Three days earlier, a freighter flying the North Korean flag docked in the Syrian port city of Tartus with a shipment of “cement.” Long way to go for cement. Within days, a top State Department official warned that “there may have been contact between Syria and some secret suppliers for nuclear equipment.” Three days later, the Sept. 19 six-party meeting on dismantling North Korea’s nuclear facilities was suddenly postponed, officially by China, almost certainly at the behest of North Korea.

Apart from the usual suspects — Syria, Iran, Libya, and Russia — only two countries registered strong protests to the Israeli strike: Turkey and North Korea. Turkey we can understand. Its military may have permitted Israel an overflight corridor without ever having told the Islamist civilian government. But North Korea? What business is this of North Korea’s? Unless it was a North Korean facility being hit.

Indeed.

Krauthammer has more thoughts on the future of the Middle East, and as usual, they are well worth reading.

Open Mouth, Insert Foot

Looks like Nancy Pelosi just got caught with one foot (if not both feet) stuck in her mouth up to the shinbone.

The [Israeli] Prime Minister's Office issued a rare "clarification" Wednesday that, in gentle diplomatic terms, contradicted US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's statement in Damascus that she had brought a message from Israel about a willingness to engage in peace talks.

According to the statement, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert emphasized in his meeting with Pelosi on Sunday that "although Israel is interested in peace with Syria, that country continues to be part of the Axis of Evil and a force that encourages terror in the entire Middle East."

Olmert, the statement clarified, told Pelosi that Syria's sincerity about a genuine peace with Israel would be judged by its willingness to "cease its support of terror, cease its sponsoring of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad organizations, refrain from providing weapons to Hizbullah and bringing about the destabilizing of Lebanon, cease its support of terror in Iraq, and relinquish the strategic ties it is building with the extremist regime in Iran."

The statement said Olmert had not communicated to Pelosi any change in Israeli policy on Damascus.

If Pelosi had any brains at all, she'd have realized that Olmert's office would immediately correct the errors in her statement. Perhaps she thought they'd be too intimidated by The First Female Speaker of the House of Representatives to contradict her, but even that stretches credibility to the breaking point and possibly beyond... the Israelis have stood up to the Arabs that outnumber them many times over since 1948, why would they buckle to one woman with a swelled head?

Maybe Pelosi is just the sort of person who needs 10 minutes each morning to figure out which shoe goes on which foot.

Hat Tip: Captain's Quarters.